Thomas Jefferson got it right.

On the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, Architect John Russell Pope got it wrong.

And the manner in which Pope missed the mark is especially relevant in light of this week’s organic change to the architecture of the nation Jefferson designed.

As a former temporary resident of D.C. (at a certain Jesuit-leaning university which overlooks the Potomac in the city’s northwest), I’d like to report, for the benefit of the unwary, two troubling aspects of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.

The Pantheon-styled edifice occupies the northern tip of a channel island in the Potomac at the lower boundary of the Tidal Basin – where, yes, I once rented one of those goofy paddle boats – near a motorists’ nightmare called Ohio Drive. Said nightmare loops beneath and beyond a tangle of freeways to the monument’s south and takes the uninitiated all the way to Hains Point (there’s a road that shortcuts the loop!) before doubling back the island’s west side to three deviously hidden parking lots. Those lots constitute (the lesser) Problem Number One: what is a hot, sticky hike to the monument in ordinary Washington summer swelter quickly tests the limits of human endurance when July afternoons bring their inevitable thunderstorms.

The greater Problem Number Two, and an indelible component of the monument’s interior, is one of elision, to wit: the enlightened founder’s “quotes” engraved there do not bear full fidelity to those which history itself has carved in stone. Though the great man’s statue is surrounded by panels containing some of his some of his most instructive thoughts, each has been edited with the ruthlessness of a tabloid editor who’s down to his last column inch.

Panel One bolts-together three key passages from the Declaration of Independence, and appropriately uses ellipsis twice, as does Panel Two with its three non-contiguous phrases from a Virginia law he co-authored; a glance across to Panel Four, its provenance similar Panel Two, reveals that all pretense of indicated elision has been abandoned.

The undisputed champion of the group is the formidable Panel Three, an amalgam of no less than eleven separate phrases – in two instances, single words – from five separate sources, stitched-up in a much-too-tidy manner without the barest acknowledgment of the deed.

Considering that the Memorial was built during the extravagantly expensive Second World War, one imagines an engraving budget perfunctorily sliced to the bone.

Jefferson was as exuberantly verbose as he was eloquent, and to do him justice requires a full reading, and representation, of his words in context. Not to put too fine a point on it, but reducing Jefferson’s thoughts to mere aphorisms puts one at severe risk of inflicting an injustice upon both the man and his meaning.

Circling above the four panels already discussed resides another passage around the base of the dome – a quote as forceful as it is succinct, and the only one rendered all in caps: "I HAVE SWORN UPON THE ALTAR OF GOD ETERNAL HOSTILITY AGAINST EVERY FORM OF TYRANNY OVER THE MIND OF MAN"

A visitor would think that Jefferson was proclaiming his antagonism toward King George in particular, monarchists in general or some diffuse Tory dogma; that visitor would be wrong. The author of the declaration was in fact setting his hand against something even more malignant: the influence of religious demagoguery in the conduct of America’s national affairs.

In the presidential election of 1800, Philadelphia clergy were circulating pamphlets declaring Jefferson unfit for office because he was not a Christian.

Which, incidentally, was no great secret. He had declared himself on multiple occasions to be an Epicurean, a subscriber to the classic Greek notion that the most fulfilling life is one dedicated to personal contentment – the “pursuit of happiness” he bequeathed us in his watershed variation on Locke’s “life, liberty and property.”

Jefferson was not hostile to religion in private life – the Memorial’s Panel Two, referenced earlier, reflects his thoughts as a co-author of the 1799 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. In a letter to his nephew (Peter Carr, from Paris, 1787) he allowed that there was personal merit in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, provided that the subsequent supernatural messianic theology developed around him was disregarded. But he understood that in public life, freedom of religion also meant freedom from it.

In his “Notes on the State of Virginia” (1785), Jefferson specifies his indifference to religion, provided faith has no bearing on the conduct of government. In a particularly memorable passage he states, “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” And it was in a letter as president, in response to complaints from a gaggle of Connecticut Baptists, that Jefferson’s phrase “a wall of separation between church and state” established America’s shorthand for the Constitution’s Establishment Clause (Letter of Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association, January 1, 1802).

So it was completely in character for presidential candidate Jefferson to disdain the Pennsylvania clerics’ attacks in a personal letter to confidant and fellow Founder Dr. Benjamin Rush, in which he described his desire to correct “...[T]hat delusion on the clause of the constitution, which, while it secured the freedom of the press, covered also the freedom of religion, had given to the clergy a very favorite hope of obtaining an establishment of a particular form of Christianity thro' the U. S.; and as every sect believes its own form the true one, every one perhaps hoped for his own, but especially the Episcopalians & Congregationalists. The returning good sense of our country threatens abortion to their hopes, & they believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I HAVE SWORN UPON THE ALTAR OF GOD, ETERNAL HOSTILITY AGAINST EVERY FORM OF TYRANNY OVER THE MIND OF MAN [uppercase added]. But this is all they have to fear from me: & enough too in their opinion...” (Letter of Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Sept. 23, 1800).

In a sense, we are in the midst of a Week of Jefferson. Tomorrow is both an exuberant homage to the national institutions he helped create and the 188^th anniversary of his death. And we’ve had four days to grieve over Monday’s dreadful violation of the values he lived.

Prominent among his principles was the belief that the greatest national good abides in secular legislation, not sectarian fulmination. His monumental “hostility,” completely historic but incompletely rendered his Memorial, was toward Christian sectarian “schemes” to subvert the law, schemes he rightly identified and condemned as “tyranny over the mind of man.”

I would suggest that, this week at least, the best remembrance of Jefferson is to imagine his response to judicially-abetted schemes which serve to create Christian sectarian tyranny over the bodies of our daughters, partners and wives.